books.google.com.au - Richard Maurice Tinkler was an ordinary man in an extraordinary time and place. This riveting "biography of a nobody" offers a rare glimpse of imperialism and the making of modern China seen from the perspective of a working-class Englishman enforcing the order of everyday life on the streets of Shanghai....https://books.google.com.au/books/about/The_Poems_of_Ossian_and_Related_Works.html?id=ntQKAQAAMAAJ&utm_source=gb-gplus-shareThe Poems of Ossian and Related Works

The Poems of Ossian and Related Works

Richard Maurice Tinkler was an ordinary man in an extraordinary time and place. This riveting "biography of a nobody" offers a rare glimpse of imperialism and the making of modern China seen from the perspective of a working-class Englishman enforcing the order of everyday life on the streets of Shanghai. Culled from Tinkler's many personal letters, Empire Made Me meticulously documents his astonishingly revealing life in the service of the British Empire between 1919 and 1939, one of hundreds of young men who joined the Shanghai Municipal Police. Responsible for maintaining order in Shanghai's International Settlement, the SMP expanded and enforced British dominion in China's most important political, commercial, and cultural center.

Tinkler would have remained just another anonymous and forgotten colonial policeman were it not for his unexpected death, at the hands of Japanese marines and an incompetent local doctor, in June 1939. His suspicious death created a noisy diplomatic incident that was picked up by journalists and splashed across the front pages of Britain's newspapers. Many of Tinkler's personal letters survived, and they describe his personal life in unusually vivid detail, including his relationships, his knowing masculinity, his travels, and his bitter meditations on his lowly position in a powerful but waning empire.

Robert Bickers absorbing biography uses Tinkler's letters as well as extensive archival research to tell the story of this man's everyday life and violent decline in a colonial world--a story that offers an uncommonly candid history of twentieth-century imperialism.

From inside the book

LibraryThing Review

User Review - simonmagus - LibraryThing

OK, it's not the greatest work in world literature, but it is great, and it did kick off the romantic revolution, inspiring Blake, Goethe, and who cares who else (everyone in that European period). a ... Read full review

Review: The Poems of Ossian and Related Works: James MacPherson

User Review - John Ervin - Goodreads

Great collection of works and history behind the poems. I am unfamiliar with this edition,,mine is from 1842 and is beautiful,,i highly recommend this book if your lover's of poetry.Read full review

About the author (1996)

Edward D. berkowitz is professor of history and public policy and public administration at George Washington University. He is the author of eight books and the editor of three collections. During the seventies he served as a staff member of the President's Commission for a National Agenda, helping President Carter plan for a second term that never came to be.